It’s all in the stars

A school in Noida has found a new way to beat exam stress. Kids, look no further than your horoscopes.

Gone are the days when nervous students used to toss and turn in fitful sleep over impending exams, dreaming of evil schemes to steal question papers. From the abolition of Class 10 Board exams to public denouncements of rote-learning, much is afoot these days to put young minds at ease. It turns out that Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal is not alone in prescribing placebos to treat exam psychoses. Tired of the terms ‘student’ and ‘stress’ being used too often in the same sentence, a Noida school is busy turning career counselling on its head.

Noida’s Marigold Public School has invited astrologers to counsel students based on their horoscopes. Perhaps, they figure, if an entire nation’s future can be based on the astral charts of a handful of individuals, what’s a little starry-eyed hope for harried students? So now, all that students need to do to zero in on their bright futures is ask someone to shine a helpful light on their planetary patterns. The idea behind this wonderful scheme is that horoscopes can help map out a student’s strengths and weaknesses, and help select courses most suited for success.

Which then begs the question: why hold any exams at all? Why can’t we just simplify our school system by dividing classrooms on the basis of sun signs and then assigning careers based on personality types? Shy Cancerian? Off to the back-end operations room to crunch numbers, you. Adventurous Sagittarian, eh? You should go on and be a mountaineer — the first one to climb Mt Everest without any formal training, with the aid of nothing but your natal chart! Chatty Aries? Public relations it is! Now, those of you frowning over the state of our school system, just send us your birth date and time and we’ll prescribe remedies and mantras to make you stop worrying and start living it up.